After I Wake (8 page)

Jordan, my therapist, does not say anything while I'm talking, kindly letting me finish. He nods a few times, and makes affirmative noises in his throat, and when I'm done, he leans back and talks for a few minutes, while I stare at the wall and play my fingers up and down the scars on my wrist, listening intently. I tell him it is a case of textbook narcissism, and he nods, saying a little about the power of celebrity being strong no matter how small of one you are.

But now, I can try to change that. Despite all the therapy and the mostly gone depression, I haven't felt much like talking the past months, and I still don't. It feels like I've lost the power I used to command over words; they seem weightless, and I don't see why I should waste energy expending them. Maybe I can use that feeling to listen to others before vomiting my opinions all over them. Who knows? My opinion may not be the right one after all.

With my remaining fifteen minutes, we talk about the future. It's really quite a daunting place. I don't know where I'll be going anymore. Before the accident, I assumed that I would keep writing poetry and make a living off of it. But the writing industry is a fickle business, and nothing is guaranteed. Well, in life nothing is guaranteed either. Now, dealing with the absence of poetry in my life, I need to explore other careers. Jordan, my therapist, says to me that he finds it imperative that I look into my options. I have published poems and had fairly decent grades; I ought to be able to get into a good school, he thinks. I find myself nodding in agreement, tuning out the slightest bit when school becomes the primary focus of conversation. I forget the conversation immediately after we finish it.

I understand his point, because if I'm done writing poetry, I need to be able to do something with my life. My biggest problem is that I spent the last fourteen years of my life ensconced in the world of poetry. My mother introduced me to it when I was three. Poetry shaped my childhood. It's kind of a challenge to break free, even now. I still think about it every day, despite my inability to produce one.

 

 

T
HE
NOTE
was the hardest part. It was for many reasons, actually. The first and foremost being, of course, that I couldn't write. I refused to adapt and fix the problem. I had to painstakingly type it out on the computer and then print it, before hiding it under my bed. I had no idea what to say either. I had no power over words and couldn't come up with a proper explanation as to how exactly I felt. I wanted to have one last day, where I could spend some time with my mom, and say good-bye.

I felt nothing. I was cursed with an inability to feel any emotion whatsoever. That's when I knew death would be a proper escape from it all. I wanted to sleep forever because it was so enticing. I stopped counting days in March. I stopped writing poems. I stopped doing work, I started ditching school sometime in April, I stopped talking to people, I stopped eating right, and I stopped living at a healthy weight as the pounds fell off. I was a barely functioning human being. I was tired.

I knew I arrived at the right moment when my mom left to go to the store. She never ventured far away from the house, but I knew I had enough time. She had begun to get suspicious, I think. I never said anything to her, and I went to elaborate lengths to hide everything so she wouldn't find out and save me.

The minute she left, her quick hug still warm around my shoulders, I retrieved the note and left it for her on the kitchen table. I found a soda in the fridge and brought it to my room, chugging it down. I wanted to have one nice thing there when I died.

In my room I put the soda on my desk, and plunged my arm under my mattress until I found one of the blades that had lived there since the depression started. Since I had stopped feeling.

But the day when I finally decided to do it, I struggled. In order to die, I needed both wrists to bleed. It took a few precious minutes to solve my problem. I chewed on my fingernails, a habit I had recently picked up. My fingers started twitching and so I gave them notice, only to find that they had stilled under the blood trickling from cuticles that had been freshly destroyed by stress. I shoved them in my pocket so I wouldn't have to keep looking at them while I examined my wrist.

In the end, I settled for getting a knife from the kitchen. I positioned the end that is generally reserved for holding between my knees and used my left arm to keep it still, while bending my right hand back to push the veins to the front.

I shoved the knife right where my arm met my hand, hitting my target of the blue lines flowing under my skin, and dragging it down, slicing the skin open so that the blood gushed forth, free from its bonds. It wasn't much, or nearly enough, but it was a start.

I grabbed the knife in my right hand that was quickly becoming slick with blood and plunged it into my left wrist, traveling up and down my forearm, freeing more and more blood.

I dropped the knife on the floor, and lay down on my bed. My wrists tingled with something I hadn't felt in months—agony. It was a new feeling, but it was already ebbing along with my consciousness. But at the very end, I knew I was really feeling again. I was incredibly pleased, happy even.

It was like I wrote in the note:

 

We all have metaphorical masks that we wear. We have different personalities depending on who we are with. There is no way of knowing which is the right one, or which one is the person we truly are. And all the while, you slowly feel the effects of the oppression that occurs from the life your body and brain have built for you. You become an artist, one who is effectively trapped in an electric chair of your own creation. Quite simply, you aren't; yet you somehow manage to convince people that you are.

 

As I lay on the bed, circles dancing in my vision, I felt my world clarify. Gone was the dull girl who stared at walls. I could feel my words rushing back precious seconds later. I could have written anything I wanted right then, and it would have been perfect. I let my eyes flutter shut as I smiled. I felt giddy. It was right to die whole, happy. I started to laugh.

The door crashed open downstairs, and my mom was home. It hadn't been long. She must have forgotten something. Moments later she screamed. But I was already reaching for my freedom.

 

 

I
SIT
up in bed, wide-awake, surrounded by darkness. I can't breathe for a moment, and the wispy tendrils of my nightmare, although it could have been a flashback, are still shrouding me and my wrists tingle uncomfortably. Once I realize that I am not dying, that I am alive, I feel an immediate and overwhelming relief. My breath is shaky as I squeeze my eyes shut and focus on where I am. I am in my bed. I am okay. I am alive. Thank goodness.

The sky outside glows with a flash of lightning, and I look out the window as thunder booms. It's a true summer storm, the kind that can shake people from the deepest slumber, or in my case, free them from the nightmares of their darkest moments. I clamber out of bed and head for the beanbag under the window, sitting in it and staring outside for a few minutes.

I haven't heard a storm like this in a very long time. It's been months. I probably heard, or more accurately noticed, thunder before I lost my hand. It's pleasant. I'd forgotten about the way thunder shatters the silence of the night. It's almost musical. This is a good storm. It's loud and powerful and angry.

It's funny actually, how you can be the very center of your own universe, and be so involved with yourself. But nature honestly doesn't give a shit. It carries on, absolutely regardless of how much you hurt. It storms and rages but softens and smiles after. It just keeps on trucking. It's so much bigger than you and cannot stop for something so small. The ocean does not stop because a single rock is displaced, so why, then, would nature wait?

With those thoughts in mind, I bolt out of my bed and race to my desk, opening drawers and looking for my emptiest notepad and a pencil. The clock glows behind me, advertising the time of 3:22 a.m.

By 3:54 a.m., I've written a poem. I have to sit back in shock. I've done it. I finally wrote a poem. My hand is cramping and sore, but it's worth it. An entire poem. I can't believe it. I've written an entire poem. It's incredibly strange… to find that I can still write. Granted, it's sloppy, and the handwriting is pathetic, though I can improve. I can get my act together. I can adapt. Darwin might have been onto something after all. I am thankful that it took a crazy thunderstorm to snap me out of a proverbial drought of nonwriting.

It quickly becomes a mantra. I repeat it to myself while I walk circles around my bedroom, trying to accept it while Sarah watches sleepily from the bed with her ears perked. I read it about seventy times, at least.

I'm in a miniature shock, it's an actual poem.

 

Clouds roll in, a distant din, there is something coming.

Lightning flashes, thunder crashes, the wind and rain celebrate.

We find it there, a charge in the air, as the world becomes fresh

again.

The grass stands tall, bearing it all, while hell storms all around.

The skies clear, sunshine is near, the muddy roads are freed.

We feel alright in the oncoming night, when silence will blanket

the Earth.

But then in the dark the devil finds its mark, and it all begins

again.

Is it a curse when we've survived worse, as Mother Nature

screams her fury?

Huddling together, we'll face whatever may come to us in the

morning.

 

I can't even focus on the fact that it rhymes, despite my blatant loathing of the matching words. I'll grow to hate the scheme eventually, but I will be forever indebted to the poem for bringing me back.

It isn't until seven more minutes have passed that I realize the calm before the storm wasn't metaphorical as I was expecting. It's a legitimate storm. How perfect. All semblance of calm is gone, but so is another layer of depression. I feel a strange freedom as words begin to lose their sense of foreignness.

I sit in the beanbag as more thunder rattles the windowpanes. My notepad quickly fills with lines, and I know I'll be spending time later, during the actual day, crafting poems and refining them to my usual standards. They won't be good yet. I'm so far out of practice with the way words interact, but I'm awkwardly full of determination because I know I can do it.

Ten minutes later, I'm gently shaking my mom's shoulder, whispering urgently. She snaps awake immediately, the only woman in the world able to sleep through the recently passed storm but wake up at the mere hint of her daughter's voice. She is nothing less than a professional mother. But to be fair, she's been at it for quite a while. And I've given her some challenges as far as being her daughter goes.

“What's wrong?” Her eyes fill with worry as I stand over her, and I can only giggle. After a minute I realize that it's probably disconcerting, so I stop and hand her the poem that is crumpled in my fist, with sweat and smeared pencil lines already coating the creases.

She turns on the bedside lamp and rapidly scans the sheet of paper with the pathetic handwriting scrawled across it. My mom starts to cry a little, and the remaining creases fill with the saline dripping from her face.

“You did it,” she murmurs.

“I did it,” I echo. My voice has an undeniable joy to it. “I will go back to bed shortly,” I start, “but can I staple this one to the corkboard?” We go downstairs together, and my poem secures a position in the corner.

Over the years, the corkboard in our kitchen has become host to a number of poems, ones I've enjoyed so much that I couldn't let them go, and so I tacked them up to remember them. Now, my new poem is up there. My 4:00 a.m. root beer tastes like victory and carbonated goodness. As I leave the kitchen to go back up to my bedroom, I turn back to give my mom a hug.

She puts a date on the bottom of the poem. When she turns and sees me glowering at her for touching my work, she laughs, a pure crystalline jingle that sounds rusty to the both of us. I keep forgetting how hard this has been on her too. She almost lost a daughter a few different times. At some point, she kind of did. I think now that she might have one back but the better, battle-worn one I like being.

When my mom's laugh cuts off, she remarks quietly, “I had almost forgotten what that felt like. It's been a while. And stop looking at me like that, Carter Alice. I want to remember the date that I feel like you really came back to me. Do you have a title for it? I can write one in if you want. I want to remember this, the day and moment your purpose came back.” Her tone whips back and forth from chastising to stern to soft. Her gaze never leaves my face.

I squint at the poem for a moment before coming up with the perfect title. “Call it ‘The Obligatory Rhyming Poem of UGH.'”

“Of what?” Confusion lines my mother's face, and I grin, getting ready to go into a long-winded explanation.

“‘The Obligatory Rhyming Poem of UGH.' Ugh being
U
-
G
-
H
, like an annoyed sigh that wholly represents my utter despisal of rhyming poems and the like.” I'm fairly certain my sentences are running on and together, but I don't care. I'm on a roll. No, I'm soaring on rounded bread. That's much more like it. I continue, enunciating the primal sound. “UGH, like an
uuuuuuuuuuggghhhhhhh
kind of noise.”

My mom just nods and pencils it in. She's probably just humoring me. I'm positive she knows how to spell “ugh.” I sigh and look one more time at the poem, full of my despised writing scheme. Then I start to laugh, harder than my mom was. I probably sound like a lunatic, but I'm beyond any semblance of caring. Tears are freely climbing down my face as I try to contain the amusement that is bubbling from my very core.